First, I'd like to apologise for this inaugural post being late. I have reasons, but they are unimportant in the grand scale of things, and I'd like to start this blog off with a bang.
The bang of "pop rocks", anyway.
The story of Love Canal is one of industrialism, poor recordkeeping, and how concerned moms can change everything.
Love Canal sprang from some not-so-humble ambitions. In the 1890s, businessman William Love foresaw great economic growth in the Niagara Falls, NY area, and he decided it would be a fantastic idea to dig a canal all the way from Lake Ontario to the Niagara River. He could build hydroelectric power stations on it to keep what he was absolutely certain, as many were at the time, was set to be a growing, bustling town running.
Love's ambitions were well intended, but recession struck, and he had to abandon his canal-digging venture by 1910. One bit to the south had been dug out already, but was left to fill with rainwater. For decades it was used as a swimming hole in the summer and an ice skating pond in the winter. There are conflicting reports about exactly when the property was turned over to Hooker Chemical Company to be used as a dumping ground for waste. It is said that the U.S. Army also dumped waste from chemical weapon experiments in the canal as well.
Eventually the barrels of waste were covered up with dirt and landfill, and the site forgotten about. People may have not known how hazardous those chemicals were. In 1953, the land was sold to the Board of Education for $1, and a school, park, and housing development were built on top of or nearby the canal. The deed for the land did include a warning about what lay beneath the surface in this area, but studies of the effects of the type of chemicals Hooker had disposed there were relatively new, and this was cheap land for the city at a time when cheap land was much needed. And for years after the neighbourhood was built up, things were fine.
The 1970s ushered in a new era of change though, both for the country as a whole and for Love Canal as a place. Heavy rainfalls dislodged many of the barrels of chemicals buried underground in the area, and the barrels, ageing and corroding like one would expect them to with time, leached chemicals into the ground, into the sewers, and even into the air via chemical vapors. Although the chiemical company had put a copper barrier n place before burying the site and selling it off, that was broken while the school and surrounding homes were built.
Area residents were complaining of strange odors in their basements after heavy rains. Children were returning home after playing outside with chemical burns on their hands and faces. Those "pop rocks" I mentioned at the beginning of this post? Those were rocks of phosphorous that had made it to the surface, that exploded when thrown at the ground, that children would play with. Children were being born with severe birth defects, and expectant mothers in the area were miscarrying at a rate far more than experienced by the general population. The local government did very little to help area residents.
TO BE CONTINUED
Author's note: Maybe actually publishing this would help.
SOME OTHER FANTASTIC LINKS:
http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Love+Canal+Disaster
http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy
http://www.bu.edu/lovecanal/canal/
http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/9721.aspx
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